Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source newsletter app like Mailchimp | Hacker News Reader

Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source newsletter app like Mailchimp

github.com

184 pointsmottiden62 comments

The value in SAAS email services like MailChimp is not really in the sending infrastructure. It's in the dark arts of keeping your IP's from spam blacklists and ensuring email delivery rates are sufficient. You'll find that any naive attempt at running your own will be very hard to scale.

You use Mailtrain to manage your list subscriptions and manage your email blasts. If you want your email to then land in inboxes instead of spam, you can use an emailing service, like MailGun or Amazon SES, to actually send the mail. Instructions for using both are on Mailtrain's wiki.

The problem with MailChimp is that it's very simple and easy to use, and once your list actually gets popular the pricing falls off a cliff. At 2,000 subscribers MailChimp is free; at 3,000 it's $50 a month, and it keeps going up.

There's no monthly fee to send email through Mailgun, and the only thing they charge for is number of emails: you can send 10,000 a month for free, and it's $5 per 10,000 after that. You can also manage mailing lists directly through mailgun, but it doesn't have as polished an interface (and you need to send the actual mailings yourself through the API). So if you want a polished interface, use MailTrain to manage your lists and Mailgun to send the emails.

Amazon SES is even cheaper, and also hooks into Mailtrain. "$0 for the first 62,000 emails sent per month, and $0.10 per 1,000 emails sent thereafter."

MailChimp offers better deliverability than Mailgun and SES, but at a pretty steep cost. If you're a professional company with income, pay the $50+ a month for Mailchimp. If you're doing a list for a sidegig or a hobby, use Mailtrain.

That difference in price only gets more pronounced as you scale up.

The cost isn't just in dollars, but in time and hassle. MailChimp will halt your send and wait for a human to review it and your list practices if you hit various undisclosed triggers. Makes sense, but if your emails are time critical and have real revenue riding on them, it's not really workable.

The alternative is to use a service that doesn't review suspicious activity, which is going to have significantly worse delivery rates.

I think a much more common alternative is to work with a provider who specializes in enterprise customers instead of small retail customers.

I'm happy to sign a long term contract and make guarantees about my list acquisition practices, but I lose money and my readers' trust if I click the Send button and it doesn't send.

Last I checked Mailgun still doesn't do SEPA Debit, correct? Cuz that is why I no-go'd them a while back. Using credit card instead of debit is incredibly annoying.

why...?

In most countries in Europe people don't really use credit cards. I only have a credit card because I travel outside Europe a lot (and want to pay online where proper payment solutions like iDeal or even PayPal are not supported).

Even when I travel outside I can use my Maestro card (tied to my bank account) 90% of the times, my credit card is more for backup purposes.

In my country (the Netherlands) you'll have a hard time paying for stuff with a credit card, most shops only accept Maestro cards and NFC payments through your phone. Though most ATMs do support credit cards. More and more shops start to not take cash anymore (expensive to handle).

I personally don't like credit cards since they are about as insecure as you can design a payment system (imo).

EDIT: I meant the insecurity of using credit cards for online payments.

You mean, most people use Debit cards? Because everyone has one in its wallet. Although it's true I only use credit cards outside Europe, because AFAIK debit cards don't work.

It appears that that "een pinpas" is a form of a debit card, though not all debit cards work:

> Credit card use in the Netherlands is very low, and most credit cards cannot be used with EFTPOS, or charge very high fees to the customer. Debit cards can often, though not always, be used in the entire EU for EFTPOS. Most debit cards are Mastercard Maestro cards. Visa's V Pay cards are also accepted at most locations.

eg. an American Express debit card (or anything else that is not one of the above) won't work at an Albert Heijn or anywhere else.

I always use credit cards for online payments(Ireland), I rightly/wrongly perceived them as having better fraud protection. It has happened a few times where my credit card has been hit for unapproved transactions, majority of the time it was picked up before I noticed and I received a call from the bank, recently I noticed it before the bank did, gave them a call and the €500 was returned to the card in two days.

Out of interest why are debit cards more secure?

I should have better clarified what I meant. I think online payment systems that require you to enter:

- your name

- the card number

- the expiration date

- the CCV security code

In any system that is not controlled by your bank is very insecure. Since that is exactly the information required to do to new payments. Payment systems like iDeal simply connect (oath style) to your bank where you login securely and approve the payment.

Recently I booked a hotel room using Agoda and I used a credit card to pay, here is what happened:

- Agoda received all the information above from me.

- Agoda used booking.com to "fulfill" the booking, they passed all of my credit card details to booking.com

- Booking.com gave my credit card details to the hotel (actually a small family owned guesthouse).

- When I arrived the guesthouse has written down all the information above on a post it attached to the monitor. Before telling them who I was they showed me the post it and asked me if that was me.

There only about 5 places in the above list where this can go wrong...

Don't Dutch credit cards have a chip?

British ones have had them since around 2004. The technical security of the card is the same as a debit card. (There are legal differences.)

All cards in Europe have chip but CCs are mostly used here for online shopping outside of the EU and that's totally unsecure if you need to type all your CC informations to an unknown source for online orders.

They might actually. As for the security: I only meant online payments (should have clarified).

In Europe SEPA Debit is cheaper and easier than credit card and you get customer protection in case anything goes wrong.

Plus I can tell my bank at any time that a specific vendor or merchant is no longer allowed to pull from my account.

I don't like paying with Credit Card. If a merchant or vendor abuses or looses the data, people can pull money from it.

Debit is much safer since it requires me to explicitly authorize the vendor and abuse is heavily punished. I can also just tell my bank to stop allowing specific SEPA Debits so I can lock out vendors that misbehave.

Interesting, in the US credit cards have much stronger protections and essentially any fraud is fairly trivial to get a charge back for in my experience (merchant eats the cost) without any impact on you. With debit cards fraud will drain your bank account instantly so there's less incentive for anyone to fix it (it's not their money in limbo). I also believe, but may be wrong, that up to fairly recently there were also stronger legal protections on credit card fraud versus debit card fraud.

Well, debit cards have strong protections here too.

If someone uses a debit card or SEPA debit on my bank account (german), I have 6 weeks to report that to my bank and I'm out. The bank then has a week to get the money back of they're responsible, etc.

Here it is definitely their money and they want it back.

I don't get this logic. You have zero liability for unauthorized charges on your credit card. Also, by definition, when you use a credit card your bank lending you money to buy something...this isn't "your money" at all.

I feel much safer using a CC since I know these aren't my funds vs a debit card where it is my money.

I also have zero liability for any unauthorized charges on my bank account via SEPA Debit. By definition it's the bank's money the moment I dispute it and vendors are required to put up a legal contact with full responsibility when they sign up.

I feel safer because I don't need a credit, I pay "cash".

> The problem with MailChimp is that it's very simple and easy to use, and once your list actually gets popular the pricing falls off a cliff. At 2,000 subscribers MailChimp is free; at 3,000 it's $50 a month, and it keeps going up.

I really like the MailChimp functionality and interface but I could never understand this pricing model and how they can justify charging that much for a few thousand users. Compared to e.g. the monthly infrastructure cost an app or SAAS project your newsletter is about, $50 for 3K users seems really disproportional to how important a newsletter is. Am I missing something here?

It's really for a marketing list and not something like reminder emails or updates if you are running a software product (email user x every time event y happens type of thing)

For an app or service though, sending out newsletters about new features or related articles is pretty common and 3K users isn't that many.

Yea, the pricing on a service like that is crazy. If you have 50,000 customers (which is nothing in terms of online services), MailChimp is incredibly expensive.

With a one-time purchase of mailing list software like InterSpire you can send as many as you want using a VPS. You'll want to monitor the logs and every couple weeks request being removed from Yahoo or AT&T's blacklists, but it costs virtually nothing to run.

> You'll find that any naive attempt at running your own will be very hard to scale.

LOL.

That's what they want you to think, but no big ESP such as gmail or yahoo have any set of special rules for Mailchimp or other big guys, because that would open them for lawsuits based on an unfair treatment.

My last company was chained to Sendgrid, until someone with yahoo email account clicked on the "spam" button 147 times... on the same email message! That was in 2015. A glitch in Sendgrid system counted each click as unique, and our spam rate got to be 27%. We got kicked out from Sendgrid faster than we could dispute it, and then they stopped answering our phonecalls.

We moved to Mandrill but that wasn't better because they were super-sensitive. We then built our own Digital Ocean $5 box and gradually start sending emails that were NOT spam. First 50 per hour, next day 100, next week 1000, you get my drift.

Today we email about 2,000,000 opt-in emails per day from the same DO $5 512MB box, built on Centos 6 and postfix. Delivery rate similar like we used to see with Sendgrid/Mandrill, at around 86% with click-tru 55% but that doesn't matter these days.

Bottom line: if you don't send spam then why would you be punished for legitimate emails?? Big ESP will take few weeks (a month?) to learn where to deliver your email and we had nothing but good experience. Of course I don't have to mention basic DKIM/Spif/DMARC other basic stuff alignment. Also bounce mailbox needs to be monitored. If you need any further info/help, shoot me a message I be happy to help.

For those reading the above message with an interest in using your own mail server a good way to get started is to use Mailcow, a Docker based system with all the batteries included.

Hi, I am planning to move away from existing provider due to the cost factor and planning to set up own mail delivery system. I reviewed Sendy but haven't made the transition yet. I am looking to host about 30K subscribers who'll receive emails every 10-15 times a month.

Your thoughts?

I'm using Sendy to send ~15k emails every day. It works fine with a few hiccups. It stops sending after every few hundred and I have to keep hitting the 'send' button again. I've scripted this so it automatically happens. I'll admit I'm due for an upgrade which may have fixed that bug, but I made some minor modifications to the Sendy code which I just don't want to try to port to an upgrade.

Know that Sendy does a phone home which is just to check if you actually purchased the code. There is also a obfuscated file that I've unwound if you were curious:

https://gist.github.com/tittietime/0284ce3b6ef5e4fd35d3aa105...

Thanks for the insights. I would like to have hiccup free delivery because sending emails isn't my main job and I would prefer it to be as automatic as possible.

Do you have other recommendations besides Sendy?

It's looking like Mailtrain FTW :)

While my experience of delieverabilty is different to yours and I don't even send any non-transactional emails, I do find the click on the spam button multiple times hack very interesting. The evil that can be done with this.

I agree that MailChimp or other hosted email platforms offer value add over Mailtrain. They're SaaS, they work on deliverability, etc.

However, Mailtrain is nice as an alternative. Even if you don't want to use it, its existence means that SaaS must compete with it.

If you become large, you could get a dedicated IP address from Amazon SES ($25/mo) or others and own your deliverability.

Mailtrain, WordPress, and others might not be what you're looking for. However, it's great that they exist. They provide competition for SaaS which pushes SaaS to be better and a release valve should the pricing of a SaaS solution get too out of hand.

We use Mailtrain behind SendGrid. SendGrid charges out the ass for keeping contacts and doing newsletters, so we use Mailtrain to manage lists and campaigns. Mailtrain tracks clicks and stuff too, which is all we really need. We've never gotten a positive ROI from emails, but use them as a way to finish off a marketing budget.

My only gripe about Mailtrain is its development stack. There was a bug and I wanted to fix it, but it has one of those "magical" type environments where things magically link up and work, which means a ton of investment on my part to figure out what's going on.

Supposedly SES is much better at deliverability than it used to be and you can pay an extra fee for a dedicated IP which somewhat isolates you from other users.

Or you could just not send spam in the first place.

We have about 700k users who have opted in to our newsletter but we only send one a couple times a year. As a result mailchimp's costs are way too much so we've used Sendy the past couple years. Our emails are definitely not spam as they're announcing new products/features/company related/etc and again, only a couple of times a year... but over time more and more often the newsletters end up in peoples spam folders. We're sending through SES so this really shouldn't be an issue but it does. I'm not sure if Mailtrain will do something that sendy doesn't do to make mail deliver better but it really seems more like mailchimp gives some kickback or deal to gmail/etc or gmail just knows that people using mailchimp are paying a lot so that goes through...

Anyway long story short, Mailtrain sounds interesting if it can solve this issue... but it's really not just spam that gets blocked as spam these days, its a major pay to play game and its the email companies that are getting paid, not the people getting the emails.

If you only send emails a few times a year, some subscribers probably forgot that they signed up or are not interested anymore so they report as spam to keep it out of the inbox. That could then send it to spam folders for others as well.

Mailtrain will help you manage your email campaigns and the marketing list, but isn't going to help with deliverability. If you have SES setup with SPF and DKIM, and you're removing emails from your list when they bounce, Mailtrain isn't going to help your deliverability. Its job is very similar to what Sendy is already doing for you.

You could also take a look at Mailgun, which is more expensive than SES but might work better, and Mailtrain has Mailgun integration. In either case, you could look at adding a dedicated IP for your lists, which would help for deliverability, but increase costs: IPs are 24.95 a month on SES, and 59 a month from Mailgun

Just sending a completely legit email newsletter with a gmail address can get you blacklisted. It's a sad reality but that's how the email works today.

Won’t stop Junkie McSpambutton from using the Junk button as a delete button. And with the virtual monoculture of the Anti-SPAM industry, getting blackballed by one ESP means you’re blackballed on multiple ESPs.

You don’t have to send spam to end up on a blacklist.

It has an interesting license history:

> Versions 1.22.0 and up GPL-V3.0

> Versions 1.21.0 and up: EUPL-1.1

> Versions 1.19.0 and up: MIT

> Up to versions 1.18.0 GPL-V3.0

There's no rationale for the changes in the commit logs nor could I find any related issues. Curious as to what caused this in only a few releases.

edit: formatting

I really dislike mailchimp. You spend a lot of money every month and get almost no innovation from their product. It seems like there’s an opportunity for a new enterprise mail sender to take away mailchimps top customers. Through the mailchimp API the service could review the historical open/click rates and if they show sufficient quality then a one button click could import all of that data. The enterprise mail sender could get there if they were willing to offer a free service for the first six months to build up the algorithmic reputation.

We recently moved to Mailtrain for the Citationsy newsletter after hitting 10K users and not having sent a newsletter from MailChimp for a couple months (basically since we hit 2K users, the limit for the free plan). We now use Mailtrain with Amazon SES and it costs less than a dollar to send one issue of the newsletter, as opposed to $250 on MailChimp. I can absolutely see the value in MailChimp, their editor is one of the best and the tools and ease of use are second to none, but the dirty secret is that you can still build your email in MailChimp, and then simply export the HTML and send it with Mailtrain.

I am curious whether your stats such as open rate changed after you have migrated.

Still no sane installation, still can’t use. “Clone this git repo and run this Docker thing” isn’t for me. If this was made into a normal system package like a .deb and/or .rpm, I would run this in a heartbeat. Or even if it could be run as a Heroku type buildpack. But this whole process is unnecessary complex.

I was actually impressed by the installation instructions. Sometimes opensource projects like this require several specific library installations, compilation, set environment variables etc.

This has two incredibly lightweight installations, a docker build and a node-js install. Both can be installed and removed fairly easily in my opinion.

I have used Mailtrain and it's a simple alternative to Mailchimp (that I also use at work). I want to recommend Sendy, though, that costs around $60 for a one-time license and uses AWS SES for sending out mail. I bought it recently and am quite happy with it. Support indie developers!

Neat. Is this your app? The tabs on the top of mailtrain.org seem to want me to log in, which is confusing or possibly broken?

How would you compare it to Sendy and EmailOctopus?

I send a lot of email newsletters and I've always wanted to do this general approach (decouple list management & analytics from SMTP & deliverability) but found existing solutions pretty far from what we'd require.

The decoupling reason and having much better analytics than simple open and click counters was the reason we built https://mailspice.com so we could use a good list management tool, a good smtp service and our vendor neutral analytics solution - just to choose the best solution for every area.

Cool, will definitely take a look. What do you recommend for list management?

We first used sendy but then developed our own solution because we had very special requirements that no existing solved: Building visual nice emails but all the time within dome defined CI. So we created a meta language to build emails from email-specific blocks with every block having special purpose (language defined) input fields to fill the placeholders within the block. No WYSIWYG was used because ci conformance can‘t be enforced with these solutions.

We migrated from Sendinblue to Sendy like everyone, to save costs.

We've sent two newsletters now with Sendy. It works well. However, I dug into the code just out of curiosity and it looks pretty horrible. This doesn't give me too much confidence in upgrading to a more recent version as it works now.

At first sight, the mailtrain code looks a bit nicer, and it has a "/test" directory.

a naive question, what about GNU mailman, yes it does not have the fancy GUI but it gets the job done?

Mailman is for discussion lists. Mailtrain is for marketing emails.

Mailman is really good for setting up discussion lists for a group or even a company, and managing all the people in those lists. People can sign up themselves, and can view list archives. You can have announcement lists, but people sign themselves up, and you generally send the announcements from your own email. If you're making mailing lists for a group of people, mailman works great, but Mailtrain is for marketing.

Email marketing software like Mailtrain, or services like Mailchimp, are for sending email blasts for marketing purposes. If you're sending email for marketing, you need to track things like email bounces and unsubscribes, to see how effective your marketing campaigns are. Mailchimp / Mailgun have additional features like report, and click tracking from your emails.

Mailman is for people who really want the newsletter. Recipients have to send an email to subscribe. It's for real newsletters.

Mailchump is for spammers. Despite all the frantic spin control, it's spamming.

Mailtrain certainly works very, very well. I wouldn't go back to a paying service.

And the "deliverability issue" stated as an "advantage" of commercial mailing solution providers is way overblown (fear always works in manipulation), as long as you follow the now very well documented rules for sane emailing practice. It's really not hard at all.

Or just uses SES - costs $1 for 10K emails.

Slight off topic rant:

It's 2018 and we still don't have a better alternative to email? Almost everyone is on Facebook but even if you do follow a page, FB deprioritizes your posts unless you pay. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to send notifications but then people have to install yet another app. Web notifications don't work on iOS.

I guess text messages are better and I haven't received any unwanted messages from the few companies I opt in for notifications.

Prior to asking for email alternatives one would probably need to define which features and procedures of current email usage are meant to be replaced.

I am a heavy email user and I am glad that none of the loads of services pitched as email alternatives were successful.

It's a solid tool working great for most people.

The signal to noise ratio is too low for email. Spam filters are pretty good these days but they still have false positives and negatives.

The other methods of contact - cell, text, messenging apps, etc are easier to white list people.

I know you can create separate alias emails for each point of contact that are all funneled to one inbox that hopefully remains private but that's still complicated.

I guess I'm looking for an easier way to give out emails that are specific to one contact that you can easily filter.

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